


A Tumult of Sky

by aliform



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Evil Harry, Evil Hermione, F/M, Gen, Grey Draco, Post-Hogwarts, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-13 16:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1233622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliform/pseuds/aliform
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was requested of me to write a dramione fic, and the result is an exploration of science, where the boundaries of white, british magical history end, and what it would be like if perspectives warp and change with adulthood and the balm (or prison) of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. We shall by morning/Inherit the earth

The bread had staled in her purse and now lay a grey-white in the pale of her palm. The salt of it stung her nose; when she was with the dead all her senses were more authentic, and she felt the damp moss seep against her robes as time rushed forward and tinged the black silk vert. A misjudgment: she fingered the astrolabe at her throat and time slowed, and seeped backwards, and then soothed itself down as patiently as her last sigh.

“Bread,” said Pansy to the gravestone.

She flicked mud from the gilded capitals. _Baby_ , she mouthed.

A shuddering of the air and a blink. The ghost of the infant melted from sight, a burst of white when Pansy closed her eyes, like the after-burn of lightning.

“Eat the bread,” she told the empty air.

The baby did not want to. It was confused, and the herbs flecking the bread sent, even now, a primordial whiff of fear through the shade of this centuries-old life, and he cowed and disappeared again, flickering in the moonlight.

“Morys,” she called gently, because that was the name his mother called him once he had been dead two years, “Morys, I can still see you.”

A thumb appeared in the air. It hovered like a fairy’s glowworm in the shallow midnight.

“Bread, Morys.” She pushed bread to thumb. Nothing. She heard a ghost behind her cough, and knew it was over.

On her way back to the hotel she whistled an eerie fizz of notes and a bat winged down and settled inside her sleeve.

Parkinson smiled at the doorman, stained her thumb with ink in the lobby because she could not control her frustration, tucked the missive into the glass tube tied to the bat’s leg, and sent it off from the inside of her jacket during a quick smoke in front of the hotel door. The bat snapped up a moth as it flew. She watched the saturniid fly for half a second longer before its spirit turned to vapor.

Her cigarette was offered to a puddle and Parkinson vanished behind a marble post.

 

* * *

  

His mother’s dark-blooming garden quivered dim in the August night like fading stars.

Hadyn’s favorite wine caught the glow of the thousand lanterns above their heads as it swirled in Draco’s hand and the effervescence of the soiree’s chatter swelled above the harpist on her dais, and the event was so effortlessly affianced to the August dusk that Draco lifted his glass in a silent toast to his mother.

It offended many that not only had Draco Malfoy acquired the job of an Unspeakable, but done so on connections and merit both.

None of those bodies were present.

Invitations had been made, blind embossed with the particulars on an exceptionally heavy ecru, a calligrapher employed for the envelopes, sealed with the family crest by a knobby little house elf who nimbly applied the wax, and finally delivered by hand to select estates and flats spread through Britain in a web of connected power.

A rush of wind erupted in a perfume of jessamine, lilies, and moonflowers, and Draco closed his eyes to to experience _being_ that much more intimately.

“A master occlumens and legilimens,” he heard his mother say to a guest who had yet to speak, “before the age of twenty- _one_.” There was silence as she looked over in his direction, swelling with adoration. “Of _course_ he’s an Unspeakable.”

Draco looked upwards. The sight of the stars chilled him as he raised himself to his toes and thought of how the earth’s speed as it turned was all that was keeping the entire party from floating into freezing, black death.

The guest captured by Narcissa said something inaudible and he heard his mother exhale. “Something with astronomy,” she said carefully.

 _Yes_ , Draco thought, still staring at the stars above them, eyeing his namesake, _don’t scare them, mother_.

 

* * *

 

Be the assistant to the most brilliant witch of the age, they had tempted. Learn from her, and perhaps a bit of her brilliance and the breath of her accolades would perfume you in a sort of halo that would make you ripe to begin the rest of your career.

It had been two months.

Lewis Llandrindod had fetched coffee, tea, and takeaway, scoured hovels and monasteries on the continent for books both ancient and modern, and after two months of drudgery only knew stray wisps of Hermione Granger’s real work. She would sense his disinterest but he was never privileged enough to be allowed near the real meat, only thrown scraps to sate his hunger before he was sent to yet another library in a village pocked by history. _Enough_ , he would whisper as her favorite curry place learned their orders by heart—it never really _was_ enough, and the pay was excellent, so he stammered onwards, but each time he arrived home at witching hour he would declare _fin_ , knowing return was inevitable.

His self-esteem was growing hostile to his psyche.

Fanning himself with the evening’s letters, he crept into the office of the youngest Assistant Head of International Law Relations in three and a half centuries.

Lavender flames danced round Hermione’s brow in a crown of light as she dictated to the quill scratching the air above her desk. Memos fluttered above her head and its halo of flame like insects to lamps, but never burning.

“—motion would make any muggle _automatically_ forget any observed magic,” she said to the pen scrawling to her left. Her hair gleamed mauve down her back, pooling in curls on the oak as she held her head in her hands.

“They’re sweeping the grates,” said Lewis quickly, irritated that her fatigue matched his own. “How much longer will you be? I could go for takeaway.”

“Not necessary,” said Hermione, her flame-crown now lemon as she snapped to attention. “I’ll be gone in a quarter of an hour.”

Lewis slithered in further, wary of entering the womb of his ills. He flung the letters into the basket floating to the side of her desk. “And to think,” he said in sullen retaliation for his discomfort, “you could have been on the Malfoy’s lawn tonight. Drinking something splendid, I bet.”

“Their illegal _felix_ -laced dessert wines?” Hermione waved her hand dismissively. “He’s an Unspeakable now. They needed something to spend their money on.”

“And tomorrow isn’t illegal? Creeping about in a dead barrister’s house?”

“I have a permit, Lewis.”

“I could have gotten it for you.” _Except the channels you went through mean only_ you _could obtain it, so it wasn't legal at all_ , he thought. _Or perhaps you could have told me why we’ll be there. Put the kettle on, Lewis. Arrange these portkeys. It’s alright that these places exist on no map. You’ll find them._

“You can quit, if you like,” she said suddenly, staring at him with concentration.

He balked.

“Legilimens classes,” she explained somewhat bashfully. “I began this month. I don’t think I like it—takes away a little of people’s humanity, don’t you think? Both ways, considering.”

Hermione Granger plucked a cobweb from her sleeve and remained oblivious to her poison.

Lewis, who had drunk enough in two months to be sick for the rest of the year, walked from the room.

 

* * *

 

Three months in Argentina and Ginny Weasley was a blaze of freckles. They had named her _Niña Estrella_ in the papers, Star Child, after an enamored journalist described her body as being covered in constellations.

It was three in the morning and she glowed cool in the moonlight. Their newly purchased Beater, Yuki Lua Gracián, was stuffing her mouth with a hot empanada from a grease-flecked brown paper bag as they walked back to their hotel.

“All I got was a cup of chocolate,” laughed Ginny, finishing her story against the wail of love songs from a nearby restaurant.

Yuki was quiet.

Ginny couldn’t even hear her chewing, and there was a sudden rushing in her ears as her stomach dropped.

“I mean—“ she started to say, but Yuki shook her head.

“We never had anything that dangerous in the Ngenechen Instituto.” The bitterness in Ginny’s mouth grew as Yuki talked around her empanada. “Everyone was surprised they didn’t shut it down the first time. The ghost of the girl who died was still at the school? Creepy,” she hissed low and soft with a swallow. “She was still there and they didn’t shut down the chamber. She _was there_ ,” she repeated, hands waving in disgust. “They kept the chamber _open_.”

They walked.

Ginny’s story was ash.

“What did your family do?” asked Yuki.

The cup of chocolate was the end. It always had been. She didn’t know what to say; she felt dirty, surrounded by death with a weariness she could not explain. The songs of the restaurant were now smeared over by sirens.

Yuki had been worth every galleon. Ginny wasn’t sure she could bear it.

 

* * *

 

The bat fluttered against his hair.

Neville Longbottom woke in flickers of spells shuddering from of his mouth as he groped blindly before sense interrupted and he stilled.

The bat was delighted that Neville was so prompt. It curled between his neck and shoulder in a tremble of velvet and then quivered against a window, ignoring the unfaltering gaze of Neville’s two owls, Halcyon and Náscha.

It was nearly dawn. His room was seeped through with the clear light of a barely surrendered night and he stood in a stupor, mumbling at the bat, who, travel-weary, had nestled inside a curtain.

When Neville ascended to Herbology professor at Hogwarts, he sequestered a spare solarium to serve as both personal quarters, office, and greenhouse. A hedge ran through and around it and he’d been allowed to begin a rambling sort of garden full of matter that inhabited whatever he was studying at the time. He found it much simpler to explain to students, as he led them in nursing birds, collecting moths at dusk, and tagging nixies, that to study vegetation was to study biology itself. “I wouldn’t teach you about the moon and ignore the rest of the solar system,” he explained. “Not when Venus exists.”

He pulled the bat from the curtain. It was sleeping and didn’t wake as he extracted the messy note from the glass tube at its leg.

She was becoming his Venus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Plath.


	2. Night comes, world-jewelled

_Don’t go so far from me_ , he said, and she would go further. 

_Write often_ , he would cry, and she lost all her quills. 

_Think of me_ , he would plead, and she slowly erased him. 

_I cannot see you_ , he wept, and she chanted back, her voice dim, _Father_ , _I can always see you_. 

One very early morning, when the sun was only a dewdrop of light at the edge of the sky, Luna Lovegood stood before a dragon mouth dripping fire and it was not enough to ignite her heart. 

One very bright midday, when the moon was only a scrape of chalk smeared on blue, Luna Lovegood held the crying remains of a lamia’s meal, and it not enough to turn her stomach still brimmed with rot.

One very early evening, when the clouds could be confused for the darkest sea, Luna Lovegood spoke mermish and still tasted the curses that had left her lips months before.  

She swept through Europe unfurling a grief that never left her heart, or eyes, or hands. Her wand broke in the Balkans as she finished the last page of a field book detailing an infant vampire in the care of a leper colony. Luna had stepped on it quite by accident after her portable writing table overturned in a confusion of spilt ink and dust. Bereft of some of its wood shield, the raw heart was now ground into the dirt next to her boot. She pulled the braid of thestral and unicorn hair from the ground and let its softness comfort her. The white strands were Dumbledore’s beard, her father’s letters. 

A third wand.

Or no wand. 

No, none at all.   

One very late night, after the last of the fireflies and before the first of songbirds, Luna burnt the fragile skeleton of her wand and watched the ash stain the leaves of trees.  

_Come back_ , she heard her father whisper. 

Her smile was her answer, and it had faded from his sight long ago, and Xenophilius was left in darkness.  

 

* * *

 

The witch strode into his office as everything he hated, her sins a song on her lips. 

Office hours were reserved for students; there was no warning, just a smile like a waiting ember and silver flashing on her fingers as she fell into the chaise lounge across from his desk, fingering the spray of chocolate cosmos arching over its back.  

Pansy Parkinson carried no burden, but Pansy Parkinson was two years older and the war was done. There were no jeers, only offers of goblin gold dripping from her lips. 

“You’re a what?” 

She crossed her legs, divulging that her black wool robes were lined in silk the colour of flame. 

“I’m a necromantic genealogist. Come, Neville, we’re not a secret, just expensive.” She pulled off a sprig of cosmos and spun it in her fingers. “I’m not your Hermione. I don’t do the _studying_ thing.” Hermione was currently at Oxford, toiling away at law, as if to become an emblem of studiousness on either side of her fantastical and ordinary history. “I like _physical_ work, like you.” 

“I’m Herbology professor.” 

“The old method was to _ask_ the ghost if they were pureblood.” She stopped studying the flowers in her hand and stared at him, a cat coiled and ready. “Errors everywhere. I want a method. We know it’s in the blood itself. Now, isolate whatever _that_ is and make it visible. You’re very smart, Longbottom. Something of a prodigy. With plants.” There was the edge of a laugh in there that couldn’t be caught unless you were listening for it, and he was. “You know my family. You know our investments. In return I could offer you much.” 

He stopped appraising the bone samples on his desk and met her gaze. “You’re asking me to come up with a _physical_ testto alter the _physical_ composition of ghosts to make them show… purity of blood that is no longer present. Through herbology.” 

“You have it exactly.”

They parted unfulfilled.

It wasn’t until he was leaving the home of a descendant of Biddy Early, whom he’d questioned on a strain of _yn lhus_ , and descended down a corpse road in the gloaming with fairies winking in the flowering gorse, when the ghost of a little girl asked him for some _arán_ and changed his mind. 

He had some leftover sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and she ate it readily, then bounded away with a skip into hereafters secret. 

Neville was bewitched. 

On his return he was seen from high windows roaming the castle grounds hunting the suicides, the accidents, the soldiers and labourers and servants who had inhabited this plot of earth for millennia before Hogwarts was even an idea shared by four.  

Distractingly, he received a letter via uppity finch from a team of American wizards with a request to join them in working with _Diné_ shamans. Neville spoke to the headmaster and took a sabbatical. After, he was gifted an elf owl in thanks for his conscientiousness and drive, and the stationery used for the final correspondence had the address of the Parkinson Foundation.   

Pansy built her clientele the world over and said nothing. 

There was an owl from the Field Museum. The man explained that his mother was a witch, and he found it _very_ interesting of course, but did Dr. Longbottom think he could do some consulting for an exhibit they were planning? All expenses paid via the Parkinson Foundation from a new grant that was a slur of numbers and capital letters, and it just so happened that there was a prairie conservation conference that weekend and they’d love to squeeze him into one of the panels if he could cobble some slides together. In a fortnight Neville found himself in a city smelling of chocolate and wet laundry, run through with wind and black jackets that always fell past the waist, giddy from the company of so many that shared his passion. He ate _bánh mì_ , abandoned his hotel for the bed of a graduate student studying Chilean folk music, and explored a world that had never been proffered to him so fully except in books. 

He almost sent Pansy a thank you note, but spilled wine on it and, after clipping it to his hedge to dry, promptly forgot it. 

His greenhouse held indebtedness enough. 

There was now a section of laundry tubs guarded by rope. Herbs pushing thick through the dirt, vines clinging to the dirty glass of his sanctum as the towers of the castle loomed claustrophobic in the fading year. 

He was gifted packages of books thick with the scent of rot and bound with clasps that needed blood or stranger to open, and knew that she was learning too. 

Seven months later Pansy Parkinson walked into Longbottom’s office as the snow collecting against the glass made the interior glow, shaking melting flakes from her black hair and pulling off leather gloves. 

“You had something you wanted to show me?” Her smile was still fire. 

He smiled back. 

 

* * *

 

Persephone Mhaiskar had punched her time card with dutiful exactness. Eleven minutes after, Hermione Granger entered the atrium of the Ministry of Magic. Persephone watched her with the same dutiful exactness presumed for viewing a luminary, as if she had carefully adjusted her telescope to seize this one star, though the atrium was droning with the trivialities of many, many stars, scattered with guests as fabled as they. She noted Hermione’s pleated robe and how it flared behind her as she walked to the receptionist at Persephone’s side, Hjördis, and asked if Viscount Visconti had been on time for his meeting. 

Persephone mutely watched the exchange, then adjusted focus as Draco Malfoy appeared behind a group of warlocks heading to the wand-weigher at the other end of reception.  

“Your assistants aren’t tissues, Granger,” said Draco Malfoy to Hermione Granger’s back (to the pleats running up spine to nape). “You can’t keep throwing them out once you’ve blown your nose on them.” 

Hermione turned smoothly, armour already on. “Who did you steal that one from? It was nearly clever,” she snapped. 

Draco looked very well, Persephone mentally jotted. He had spent his summer in Nepalese observatories. His eyes were more grey than previously marked—all colour scoured away until emotion stood directly to the fore, and they were bright in his golden face, tanned from high ultraviolet light on snow. They were now cruel, his whole posture at ease as he leaned into the desk. 

He picked at a cuticle that didn’t need it. “From Llandindrod, of course. He came straight to our comforting arms once you’d forced a resignation out of him. No one likes to be a domestic.”

Persephone nodded at this, if only to her desk. `

“He was paid. It didn’t used to be that way.” Hermione tossed her head and Persephone wondered at the schoolgirl snared in past glories under her skin. “Don’t trivialise. The American legal system is much worse for new barristers.” Hermione Granger sniffed and put something in her purse; Persephone couldn’t see from where she was sitting. “Congratulations on your newly acquired position.” 

Draco batted off the compliment as an errant fly; it came prim and rote and Hermione was turning to leave.  

“Granger, I only have one clever thing to say to you,” he said, leering. 

“Oh, euphoria.” 

“Your life has been built around the idea that knowledge is always available to you insomuch as it is recorded…” He smiled to himself as she tensed. “Your downfall, therefore,” he hissed, malice exuberant, “is expected.”  

Then he shut her out with a turn of his head and a smile to the receptionists, now foisted into the role of audience, and not merely viewer, before he turned toward the elevators. 

The hum of the atrium was stagnant around Hermione’s shock.

Hermione’s advisor at Yale had told her those exact words three years ago. He’d slipped into her mind as easily as a haunting. 

Her hands shook as she walked away.  

This, too, was recorded.      

Hjördis snagged Persephone’s eye and they gave each other low looks, as mermaids do when they signal to each other with their eyes just above water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Philip James Bailey.


	3. Paix à tout prix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter traverses years, and is not linear by any means

Percy Weasley was courting a client on a supper date when Harry Potter passed through the restaurant at the elbow of a waiter with a girl Percy would know the name of by morning.

After the hum of celebrity had waned to a dull glow that settled over the other patrons and made them feel a little cowed, a little more self-conscious as Harry began to order drinks, Percy went back to explaining the advantages of opening up a wizarding school in the American midwest.

The client now had full view of Potter and his date and was distracted. She lipped her pipe absently. Percy, polite to nuances, slowed his speech to a patient murmur.

“Aren’t you glad he followed and didn’t lead?” the client queried in a burst, as if she’d been waiting to say that for a very, very long time.

“Exactly how?” asked Percy, who had seen Harry with snot running down his face, with oatmeal stuck to his upper lip, had heard him whine about missing the last slice of toast or the loo being taken. The celebrity was gilt glazing over Ron’s-best-friend and the-boy-who-lived, titles so old and careworn they were now a treasured memory, the bright beginning of something that had quickly been besmirched with reality.

Harry was still the boy who lived, but he was now the boy who kept on living.

Percy didn’t consider it all that interesting.

“I mean, said the client, who had never smelt Harry’s armpits after a wrestling match with the twins, “Dumbledore had him played. But what if it never happened? He chose Potter. As a boy, of course. Infant even.” She tapped her pipe on the tablecloth with a wink to her steak knife. “Some say he was a front.”

Well.

And Percy thought, and thought of how his own family had rewarded loyalty, and how his own family had been rewarded for their loyalty.

* * *

 

Scattered across the Burrow like orphaned memories are portraits of Molly Weasley’s children.

Bill is fourteen. He is taped to the mantelpiece in the bedroom. His hair is cropped close and he keeps pulling his lips back over his teeth and wiggling his tongue.  Sometimes when Molly is tired she presses his forehead very firmly with her finger and tells him to behave.

Ginny is seven, above the sink. She keeps running out of the camera’s eye, legs a pale blur; her body a fading slant of moon. When a breeze floods the kitchen her photograph flaps precariously from its single piece of tape.  

Ron is in the hallway and on her dressing table. He is three and nine. By nine, his nose fills his face, and his eyes are woeful, accusatory. He falls from the vanity when Molly moves furniture to clean and Molly forgets; when she spies the little frame between plaster and oak she apologises to her crying son. He’s set back down and in an accidental bump falls face-first, the velvet support stiff like a broken toe. He is left this way for some months until she and Arthur fight and she cleans to quench anger. The glass and frame are dusted with the edge of her robe and gently placed back on the lemon-scented oak.

Fred is on the bathroom cabinet. In kitchen drawers. On the mantelpiece in the sitting room and dining room. On her bedside table, shrunk to an inch and haloed in silver. Sometimes Arthur wakes to darkness as the body beside him shifts the blankets with short suffocated sobs, and he turns to wrap their grief in his arms as she cries for the years before them. They will remain parents until the day they die. Molly knows she will, with the gravity of time, be without him longer than he was ever wearing her sweaters. Fred waves at them from the darkness that is her cheek when she holds him there.

George is where Fred is, except when he is not. There’s a professional press photo of him flanked by his mother and father at the opening of the joke shop. It’s stuffed in a drawer. Molly sees it when she needs her address book.

Charlie is on the mantelpiece of the front room. His arm is across the neck of the largest dragon he has ever studied—a sapphire-scaled beast he personally led the breeding program of. A hallway away, he’s tucked into the frame of a bathroom mirror, fifteen and stocky before a growth spurt. He is only eight beside a hanging portrait of Fleur and Bill and himself at their wedding. Every so often he tongues the gap from a missing tooth.  

There are three portraits of Harry Potter in the house. Each are framed. None are less than twelve inches tall. She dusts them every Sunday, and wipes down the glass with white vinegar once a month.  

Harry is always smiling. For that she is grateful.

* * *

 

The gilt letters of his name have peeled from Arthur Weasley’s office door. He keeps neglecting to fill a work order to make them presentable again, though Perkins has offered to do the necessary paperwork for him. It won’t do, Perkins insists, that the head of the department has a new office with his name littering the threshold. Arthur will wave him away and insist on getting it done the next week.  

Perkins has the adjoining office, making their double-roomed department a sort of suite. He keeps his door closed and quietly plays choral music. The letters on Perkins’ door are always fresh and glint in the firelight, scolding. Memos wiggle through, paper wingtips fluttering, and Arthur thinks it’s for the best. His hoarding threatens. He eats cold chicken mince on toast balanced on a careful hand because his desk lacks space for even the sparest of plates—piled with extension cords, batteries, circuit boards, and toasters that spread crumbs each time their box is shifted, Arthur says he’ll organise it all—once Luna returns, he jokes. But there is too much to find.

Once or twice a week Arthur Weasley visits Muggle London and whistles as he goes through the bins hugging the curb in their patient wait till morning. He finds a whole container of floppy discs and reads the labels on each, alphabetises them with care, and sets them proudly on his shelf with a little sign.

However gratifying the entire process is for as many years as he has dared it, it is after he finds a specific graffitied skip in the London suburbs that the rest of the hunt becomes a distraction compared to this single treasure. Molly would get an owl insisting on paperwork and Arthur would flee to this spot (sometimes Wednesday, sometimes Thursday) and stand in dirty newspapers and carefully lift beer bottles and set them on the pavement in neat lines until his flashlight shone on warped glossy pages.

 _MAN FAKES MOON LANDING_ , the first magazine had screamed. 

Letters are begun addressed to Harry. None are sent. Arthur wants to ask him about the fake moon landings and the chemical water that everyone uses to brush their teeth. He wants to know why parents give their children these vaccines that are full of sickness. He wants to know what is on his collection of floppy discs. Once, he found a catalogue of computer parts and no floppy discs were sold therein. Arthur felt crippled, and despaired at his humble collection of castaway technology.

There was too much to learn. The other world was too strong, too advanced. They had pretended to go to the moon!

Sometimes Arthur will place his wand on his desk as a comforting reminder of all that is and would remain secure.

He begins to bring the conspiracy magazines home wrapped in brown paper. As he passes the mantelpiece, Arthur nods to the portrait of Harry, fourteen inches tall, fourteen years old, and thinks, _Thank you_.

This becomes a tradition.  

 

* * *

 

Ginny’s fingers are too large for the leather diary that was at the bottom of a box she was just finishing sorting in the bedroom of her childhood. She remembers its stained leather face instantly.

Holding her breath, she flips to the last entry.

_Dear dairy,_

_I found a new dairy! It was in my cauldron. I don’t think it’s from Flourish & Blottts (I am sorry for the extra t). It looks old. I don’t know how it got there?? But I don’t think it’s bad if I keep it. There was no prise on it—I didn’t steal it!!!!!! I am going to start writing in that one. I will miss you. I am starting school and I should have a school dairy. You will be safe at home. I am going to lock you in my trunk!! I’ll ask mum to keep the key safe. Maybe I will write in you more later._

_Don’t forget me,_

—and her name scrawled in full with as many loops and twists as could fit the rest of the page.

Ginny’s eyes close. She bows her head over that before she cannot return to and keeps very, very still.  

* * *

 

The moon was setting behind slivers of cloud fretted above the line of trees behind the eldest child of Molly and Arthur. It made him think of ghosts. Was the sky cursed tonight? The thermos in his hand was warm and he flexed his knuckles and noticed a scar that hadn’t been there before. Cursed moon, perhaps.

The jade-black sea lapped at the rotting stone steps leading into the water a few yards before him. A coffin, blacker than the sea, lay on the topmost stair.

At the height of Bill’s thighs was the head of Connor Crowe, the ageing man who had led him to the old church-beneath-the-sea. Dew was soaking his pants. He’d held his vigil since dusk and the wet was worth the respite to his aching legs. He began a sing-song that fled over the grass and halted right before the notes touched foam. 

“To the woods and waters wild, with a fairy hand in hand,” he croaked, slowly, slowly, “for the world’s more full of weeping…than you can understand…for he comes, the human child…to the woods and waters…wild…fairy…hand in hand…." He stopped abruptly. "But it does na’ good.”

Bill didn’t take the time to shrug at this.  

Then! As the smell of rain sheathes the earth before any drops fall, the sound of a dirge rushed through the pair in a wind that left Bill tucking his hair into his collar.

“Ah!” gasped Connor Crowe, and he waved his hat as the melody swelled above the sea and lights spasmed bright beneath the water. The sea went from jet, to sapphire, to aquamarine. Crowe stood and pointed. “Here they come!”

The soft threnody of the ghosts flooded through the grass before rising, high, high in the air with a sweet clear wail as one voice rose above the others in mourning. Before them the sea lurched and grew pale as the light soaked through the waves, and left the stone stairs shimmering as the water drew back, and each man held their breath as the ghosts rose from the water in a slow march up the stone. Their song did not stop and their voices were lovely, full of water, singing a melody as familiar as the smell of the earth.

Quick, before they touched the coffin.

Weasley strode forward at a measured pace, body loose. A mourner turned her head and with blind eyes gave Bill a nod.

“When mortal eye,” Bill began, still walking towards the cursed pallbearers, “our work shall spy—”

“—And mortal ear our dirge shall hear,” all the merrow said at once.

Each pallbearer looked at their hands.

“The daughters of the sea,” sighed one, “are no longer doomed to bury the dust of the earth!”

❧ ❧ ❧

Later in the guest bedroom of a cottage Bill sat with his owl and inked a quick letter to Ginny.

Dear littlest sister,

This _futbol_ thing sounds interesting. I don’t see how a sport played on the ground could be better than anything in the air. Flying, Ginny. That’s always better. I don’t want to hear about anyone’s muscular thighs either. Thanks.  

Tonight I helped break the curse on a few merrow. No one really remembered the curse except for a couple villagers. …You can’t really call this place a village. The site was hard to get to. Long ago a castle sunk into the sea. The church attached to the castle…long story short, some prince married a merrow woman and the merrow were cursed to bury the dead of that man’s family until a mortal saw them carrying the coffin away. If it’s even right, that is. That’s the thing with breaking curses. Always questions unanswered. I wish you could have seen them all in a row standing on their sea-steps at the very end. It’s hard for a ghost to be pretty. Ghosts are ghosts. But I guess when you’ve lived in water for eons the water gets in you…watching them was like watching rippling light. I don’t regret leaving Gringotts. Ever since you were cursed by that horcrux some curses were more important than gold and treasure even if they don’t pay as well as a bank. I know you’ve heard this before but I’m glad I finally acted on it. I don’t think you’ve heard this part: I think George and Fred and Ron and even mum and dad not noticing anything was wrong helped me make up my mind. Have I told you that? The twins and Ron were all under the same roof as you and no one of them watched out for you. I still don’t think mum did right by you afterwards. She’s always been a squall instead of a sail anyway. I’m sorry you found that old diary. Maybe you should make a new dairy and put a hex on it for others. Is that a bad joke?

How’s Ron? Does he still want to make that wizard chess camp for kids? I’m going to write Percy next about the girl, don’t worry.

Cheerfully your eldest-brother-always

P.S. Please visit Fleur sometime if you can now that the season’s over. Having a pregnant wife means I worry twice as much as I used to. 

P.P.S. What is Harry doing nowadays?

 

* * *

  

Dear Harry,

I’m with Charlie in Beijing right now. We’re going to see a really rare sky dragon. Bill says it’s a celestial dragon, a 天龍 (hope that’s all the little lines I need!). (Bill says I did ok). I don’t get to actually see the dragon but I do get to spend George’s galleons on all the noodle stalls I want. Food is so cheap here! I think I’m growing again. I don’t know if it’s the food or me but mum will be angry I’ve already grown out of my robes! In China a lot of wizards just wear whatever they want and by whatever I mean “traditional” clothes so our robes kind of stand out in a way. It’s hard to explain. I mean, everyone here looks normal but we’re the idiots in the robes and they’re just in their Chinese pyjamas. I’m only here for two weeks and then I’ll be back with George to help with the shop more. How’s auror training going? Did you get Hermione’s letter about the Yale thing? I don’t know why she wants to go to America and Oxbridge. I bet it’s her parents that want her to study law. It’s not like she needs any more excuses to tell us we’re wrong about something.

 

Dear Harry,

Have you heard that Luna’s missing? The last place she was in was Romania. They found her field journal. They’ve started a search. It was really hard to write that. I’m getting letters from Neville and Ginny and the rest every day now. I wish we had something faster than owls. Speaking of, your new owl bites, mate. See the blood on this letter? Your fault. 

Dear Harry,

I got your last letter but none of the others if there were any. It’s been three months since they started looking. The funeral is in about three weeks. She had a will I guess so they’re following that. Where are you?

Dear Harry,

I’m still working in the joke shop—in one of the new stores. There’s five now. Mum and dad are fixing up the Burrow into a proper little farm. I was thinking of opening up a chess camp for kids. I like teaching or at least explaining things and I love chess so I think with some money from Fred & George I can try out something small and see how it takes.  

Harry,

I’m an uncle now! Victoire is the stupidest name. They didn’t like my suggestion of Harriet Harry Hero Potter Delecour-Weasley. Mum’s going back and forth (I’m home right now) saying she’s the bonniest bairn and knitting her five hundred hats a day. I think if they hadn’t moved to Paris mum would move in with them.

I haven’t seen you in months. Mum’s pretty worried about you—can you drop by sometime so she can fuss over you like she always does? Oh, warning: she’s got pictures of you all over the house now. Ginny hides them all whenever she’s home. I thought you’d laugh at that.

Harry, I can’t be my own best friend. Hermione doesn’t write anymore. Can you reply one of these days?

Yours always,

 

* * *

 

His mother told him it was too morbid but George didn’t care. He kept a mounted chunk of the pillar that had killed his brother on his office desk. “This noble piece of masonry was the undoing of the best twin anyone could ask for,” read the little engraved plate at the base. 

It is very important to tell people that he was still a twin.

“I miss you,” he’d tell the chunk of granite.

“You suck at haunting anything,” he’d tell Fred’s gravestone.

Thinking of sharing the joke with Fred became the punchline to every new joke he heard. After awhile, this stopped.

The first time George went into Hogwarts proper after the war he made sure to walk down a very specific hallway.

The roped-off bit of swamp had a bridge made of stones for Hogwarts students to carefully tread across and this was often a first year’s introduction to the legends of the Weasley twins, and older students would point to the brass marker embedded into the stone wall that commemorated (politely) the notable history behind many a student’s distress over their stinking robes after a failed traverse of this passage.  

“I hope you’re not here,” he told the swamp. “You’re a Weasley. You don’t belong in a swamp.”

“I can’t be exactly the same,” he told the chunk of pillar. He was so fearful that if he changed, he would no longer be the Fred-with-George, only George-who-was-twin-to-a-dead-brother.

Fred was the only one who could understand.

“Can you imagine being a muggle,” he whispered to it once. “Still photos. No ghosts. No resurrection stone. What’s death for them, then? Does it make it better?”

In a month after Fred’s death there was an accident, and George lost an ear. Of course, it wasn’t an accident. His siblings understood. His mother never would, but his siblings became more precious to him than they had before. If they understood, then Fred was a part of them all.  

* * *

 

“Your mother’s right, son.”

With great care, Charlie rested the bandaged arm on the kitchen table. “Enough with this,” he said.

Ginny, a shadow, sat on the counter next to the stove. She had always enjoyed this sort of learning experience from her siblings. It was a privilege of the youngest.

She looked at the picture of herself taped to the wall. Did she really used to have that many freckles? How did they all fit? With great solemnity she had once proposed at tea that freckles must be valuable somewhere and they should figure out the best way to sell them, so their poverty could end. Her mother and father had fought for a few days after that. She had never understood what she did wrong, and that marked a turning point where she began to go to a brother before a parent. Ginny only remembered the story as it had been repeated back to family friends for a laugh. She had been seven. She didn’t know how old she was in the picture.

“Enough with you!” flared Molly. “You’ve been all over the world by now, surely it’s time to stop something so dangerous…”

“To settle where?” asked Charlie. “To do what?”

“Wherever you like of course! But we would love to have you closer, you know that perfectly well. I just worry with all these scars and now you’re missing fingers—“

“—Half a pinky, mum. I’m not cripple.”

“But still…” There was a silence in the kitchen as everyone's emotions circled with teeth bared, frightened to go further. Charlie lunged first. 

“Where’s Harry Potter?” he asked, voice flat.

Ginny tensed. She cocked her head, but her brother didn’t notice the movement, or did and didn’t look at her.

“What do you mean?” asked Arthur.

“I know you offered him a place here, you two. And I wish he had! There’s your war hero to primp and worry about—can’t you see mum with a tray every day with some nice hot broth?” Charlie stopped to focus. This isn’t what he really wanted to say, but he’d never been particularly good at the whole mushy-to-mouthy-thingummy, as George used to call it. 

His parents stayed silent to let him think and in his anger their thoughtfulness was a slap of sanctimony.

“If you had Harry Potter to dote on then you could let us all live our lives.” He closed his eyes tight and shook his head. “I am…I am counting the months till that baby is born.”

Ginny wanted to laugh but didn’t.

Molly seemed to sense this and tried to catch that emotion, however ill-felt, and her tone was light. “Ginny! What do you say to this? Your brother wants to be crisped to nothing who-knows-when and tells me to look after Harry Potter instead! Harry’s free to live his life—what’s it got to do with me? Answer that one, either of you.”

But Ginny refused to play the game. “Is that why you talk to all his pictures, ma? You and dad?” She only looked at Charlie as she said this. He grinned back.

“Isn’t one child gone enough?”

They all looked at Arthur, and he looked at the floor, his words a noose around him. 

Ginny shrunk inside of herself.

Charlie’s face greyed. He was now to the point of anger where he was calm, prepared to say whatever he wanted. Ginny stared at the tightness of his jaw as he spoke.

“Do you know how angry Fred would be, you using his death to chide me? Of course not, you were never a father. You’re the real eldest son, dad. Molly’s way, all the time. And what do we get from that? A chance to pick our sweater colours? And then this boy comes, the most famous boy in this country, and you still give me haircuts and I can’t even pick the length I like and I’m an adult, but what does Harry get? You, mum, he gets you. A mother. Who was Ron then?”

At this point, Ginny left the room. Charlie’s voice followed her up the stairs.

“—Your own son, ignored, couldn’t you see he was comparing himself to us all the time, and he was miserable, and you thought a new child would fit in this tiny house when your own son wasn’t—“

“Enough,” Molly roared, grabbing a dishcloth to dab her eyes. “This is cruel,” she wailed.

“You know what’s cruel?” thundered Charlie. “When a little sister is possessed by _Voldemort_ and her own family doesn’t notice. When she has three brothers in the same House and they don’t notice. That’s what Voldemort knew about our family—that’s what Ginny was telling the dark lord of our age—when Bill and I left no one was looking out for her or Ron. Easy guess why Ron started to pick on her. And what did Ginny get when the diary was destroyed? Oh that’s right, no one noticed her because Harry saved her. We were all Harry’s whipping boy, mum. Too bad he didn’t go for Ginny like you wanted so you could have him all nice and proper in holiday pictures.”

Ginny listened from the landing of the servant’s stairs.

(Arthur knew the floorboards intimately enough as well (as did they all) and had listened to see if his daughter’s steps traveled all the way to her second floor bedroom and when they didn’t, he rubbed his eyes and looked at the kitchen rug.)

“Well,” said Molly, tears running down her cheeks, “I did my best with each of you. That boy had no mother. What was I supposed to do? Not love him as much as I could? Go ahead, shame me for doing my best.” She smacked the dishcloth against the table. “But I won’t stop worrying about you.” She choked and Charlie felt more hopeless than he had in months. “I’m your mother. It’s what I’ll always do.”    

He could call her a martyr, right then. Her hands were shaking—they always shook a bit now—and his tongue was stymied. She would always pick and choose. Couldn’t she understand why they had all fled?

Charlie said goodnight. Arthur’s face relaxed as he watched his son hug his mother, the rigid line of her back solid even after the embrace was over. He put the kettle on once Charlie went round the corner.

Passing Ginny on the landing, Charlie gave her a hug for a very, very long time. She kept nodding into his shoulder, and that was all he needed to understand.

“Not forever,” he told her, and those words sutured the evening without a whimper.  

* * *

  

Cicadas sung their flat droning hymns and Fred, in a beautifully curved oak bough in the Forbidden Forest, glimmered like a trapped moonbeam in the leaves.

Harry Potter kicked through the twigs.

Fred no longer had any sense of smell and sounds were dim, but sight was a new sense altogether. Did you know that when you die you can see the stars in the daylight? This was on his list of things to tell Ginny, if he ever saw her again. Did you know that you can see light, always? Its spectrums? Did you know that it has a feeling beyond warmth, and a taste? 

Harry Potter stood with his glasses catching starlight on his long, meandering walks that seemed pointless and for that, Fred was unsettled. He had died for these aimless walks and the words that vibrated through the insect thrum when Harry muttered to himself.

Time had ended for Fred—so had seasons. He forgot to count years as he followed Harry on his ramblings over perhaps half the forest, but he did count words. They were strung together to form sentences—something Fred was afraid of mimicking for fear that he would not remember how and fear that he could not speak even if he remembered—and so he listened to each sentence as someone with a regret for a lack of musical aptitude listens to a brilliant aria or such: woefully awed, jealous, and knowing they may never understand the depth of what their ears were privy to. He knew to make a _t_ sound he would flick his tongue against the inner rim of his front teeth and he would practice the motion with dedication but the difference between forming a _b_ and a _p_ were now lost. Sometimes his losses made him afraid. He was already dead—he should be fearless. Feelings remained. Feelings would never dull.

It has to be here, Harry would say to himself. He’d become chorus to this weird little play in the woods and Fred audience; there were no lengthy monologues, but a high, desperate string of verses Harry said often enough to become an eventual haunting rhyme.

_It has to be here._

_It must be here._

_The stone is here, somewhere._

_It was lost once so it can found again, somewhere._

Harry’s walk became jumpy. More distracted. He would jerk, or look over his shoulder too many times, and often got down and patted the ground with his white, white hands. He began to bring a shovel and dig about. Sometimes he would not have the shovel and instead poke with sticks.

Fred liked watching him from the trees the best. He could not hear most of it but he saw enough detail to mark Harry’s anger and the helplessness that he had never, as Fred could recall, let anyone truly see before.

Hopeless, he wanted to chant back down to Harry, except his tongue does not move anymore (except to make a _t_ and he is sad that none of his family have any names that started with a good crisp _t_ ),

_I have the resurrection stone, it._

_You can’t have it,_

_I knew what you were looking for, Harry, it_

_Does not belong to you._

_Please stop_

_it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bill's story is inspired by, and Connor Crowe's name directly lifted from, an Irish fairy tale. 
> 
> Chapter title means "peace at any price."


	4. "I suppose a magician might," he admitted, "but a gentleman never could."

Pansy screams as they attack.

Mites—mites and feathers fill her mouth, robes whipped to a froth as Earth stands on hind legs to eat her, she’s knotted in a maelstrom of feathers, feathers fluttering inside her skull behind her ribs—she’s going to hit—her bones are wings, heart plucked—her wand—quick—

A surge of gold bursts against the sky and falters.

Luna Lovegood stands on the back porch steps of Emory Jackson’s house in Ogle County, Iowa, and watches the sky drip glitter. 

“Wonder why the Kencove kids still got fireworks this late,” says Emory. 

The Kencove lot is dark except for all of a few handfuls of yellow leaves that have yet to fall from their ash tree. The innocence of that darkness charges the air; the darkness is an ignorant slumber. Luna tastes dread as the sky flashes gold once more. 

“Expensive ones, huh?” Emory reaches for his lighter. “Wonder if we have a few sparkl—“

“Not fireworks,” Luna hisses, and the storm door slams shut behind her. 

“9-1-1?” Emory calls after her, getting to his feet. He knows he’s said the wrong thing, but half their lives together have been this way so far.  

“No,” she yells back, running to the broom closet in the kitchen. “Stay where you are. I don’t have a wand—“ she stops, he can’t hear her anyway, and grabs the neon green plastic broom that is the first thing her fingers find. She runs back out and he steps away to give her room. 

Her smile jolts him. It’s as peaceful as a flower. She begins mumbling spells and in the next moment she’s in the air and he watches her hair fade away, a nimbus against the newborn darkness. 

Emory sits on the dipping porch step, hands clasped behind his neck, and waits while their coffee turns cold. 

In seven minutes she returns. 

Her makeshift mount falls sullen to the porch floor. 

“I couldn’t get up high enough on this,” she explains, in the matter-of-fact way that comes without remorse or blame. “They went up too high to see. I hope they’re alright.” Her hair is oily with grime from the wind.

“Is there—“

“I don’t remember the correct process anymore,” she explains, half to him and half to whoever she had failed to rescue. “I don’t know if anyone is coming to Obliviate us.” She touches the wire mesh of the porch screen. “I don’t think anyone cares out here.”  

 

* * *

 

The spell for oxygen was so instinctive Pansy could not remember thinking it as she soared to 35,00 feet with an ugly laugh as the dead birds left her, invisible, malicious, but restricted to those spheres they had once inhabited, and no more. 

She did not like this place. Time is a construct, she reminded herself. These birds may have attacked a different witch a thousand years ago and instinct rendered them helpless to routine, mindless and simple and unaware they were even dead. But here things were more eerie than they should be. She breathed a shield charm and began to descend. Adrenaline thrummed bright, thought crystallised. 

With a flick of her finger her star map floated before her. She was now five miles off her route and it was too late to begin her self-assignment. The hotel would not be expecting her check-in until morning, once she had finished, but there was nowhere else in this tiny town to go.  

A room had been booked at a sort of bed and breakfast owned by a Mrs. Schaetzle, next to a bakery that looked somewhat promising. The owner had been surprised to receive a call from someone in a different country who wanted the best rooms two weeks in advance, but from then on Schaetzleenthusiastically bellowed “top of the morning to you!” whenever Parkinson made another inquiry as time slogged forward. More unnerving was the same voice answering the phone of the bakery next door, until she learned that the owners were chums and often spent their mornings together. There wasn’t much to do in town. She’d already learned the names of half the residents, and the church she was visiting was being rented out the next week for a family reunion. It had been promised for a wedding the week after. “She’s ten weeks along and everyone knows it,” sighed the other end of the line. “Makes for a mess of things. But the father has a good job at the packing plant in—“ 

Pansy had interrupted; it was enough for this Schaetzle to sense the beginning vibration of her accent and would curtail speech to wonder at the foreign tongue.  

The astrolabe at her throat turned against her skin and the coldness of the other side was a reminder to focus.

Clarence and Ella Owens had purchased a one-bedroom house in a village where chickens escaped from back gardens and the only streetlight was at the intersection of Main and State, next to the theatre and library. The theatre boasted six screens and the library an annual circulation of 86,197 volumes. 

The entire town was crowded by endless rows of shimmering green-stalked corn soldiers who slowly died over summer’s course, until cut down at the ankle to leave the population in their black-roofed homes the only solid thing between earth and sky.  

On a whim, Clarence put down strawberry runners in the south garden and built a shed in the west corner of the yard, and swore at the neighbour’s goat, who would, bug-eyed, slaver dripping from her lips, chew the dandelions that threatened to invade from her yard. Ella kneaded bread dough in eternal rounds ( _turn_ , fold, _turn_ , fold, _turn_ , fold, _turn_ ) every Thursday morning and left white fingerprints on door frames. On Sunday, Clarence did yard work, the smell of gasoline and cut grass lingering through the back bedroom. They were ordinary folk, and that was enough. 

Hands itching from soapy water in late July, Ella stared out her grimy kitchen window and wished the wash on the line would dry faster. 

One by one each sheet burst into flame as they snapped in the wind. Pale cotton flowers were devoured in light, early fireflies winking before the flames as Ella screamed for Clarence. 

Preacher Matthews was confounded. He turned circles in his boots and Meryl Jameson, who’d brought along Mable Elston, had toed the charred scraps scattered on the lawn. Mrs. Henry Landry stole a shred caught in the peppery leaves of a tomato plant and made a potpourri sachet from it. “God touched that,” she would say to her husband. 

The Owens were the subject of that Sunday’s sermon and sat proudly in the front pew. 

Their lives continued in much the same manner they had before—except both felt marked for redemption and therefore humbled. Clarence sung in the choir and didn’t call Ella pudge-pot. Ella bought a scripture framed in cheap wood and hung it above the stove. When their daughter sold their house after their deaths she pitched it, spattered in grease. There was no more magic. 

Ella’s journal was a ledger with a sturdy green cover purchased from a general store. Pansy had found it at an estate sale in New York wedged between an almanac and a family bible. She’d idly flipped through the log of daily weather, and then found the journal entry where Ella described how God had set her sheets on fire to show His divine will. Curious, she had set out to see where they were buried. She did not know much about this region—her learning was concentrated on the east and west coats, and the native populations and their magic were far more intriguing than the lives of people who never considered different kinds of salt and whose social circles never included anyone whose education had gone far enough to make them hate their humble origins. Pansy, history-obsessed as she was, had no time for the mundane. In a word, she was a snob. But she was trying, and now she was trying to remember why she ever cared in the first place. Neville had written her on the subject after a particularly inflammatory letter. 

_Parkinson,_

_Your great aunt Acacia Winifred was an invalid socialite who spent most of her time in her house. She would take two hour walks in the country. She would write letters for four hours. Once a fortnight she’d go to a play. My point is, she ate good food. She met good people. These people are the same. They eat good food. They talk to their neighbours. They watch TV for four hours. Their life is full enough for them._

_Respectfully,_

_Longbottom_

She had replied, fuming, more angry that day for discovering that the family she had been assigned to track were vampires and not human. 

_My dearest Neville,_

_Compliments to your grandmother, &etc, _

_The tone of your letter suggests you think I am incapable of humanising with those of a birth class below mine. This is a lie. I work with men and women of all societal backgrounds, income levels, races (and so forth) and am professional in my demeanour with every one of them. I am now requested on every continent by name. I will not have you suggest I look upon others so ignorantly. My career demands this. Familial bonds trump circumstance._

_Auntie Blossom hosted a salon with some of her day’s greatest thinkers. She spoke Ancient Greek, French, Mandarin, and Catalan. Auntie Blossom shook Edison’s hand. Do not imply that any of these small town Americans could compare. If you had to live in one of these villages I don’t think you would be very happy. What is a country vegetable garden to André Le Nôtre?_

_Ever yours,_

_Pansy_

Pansy was now at the height of the old oaks skirting the gravel road she would follow into town. 

She’s waiting for the church and—ah, here it was. Its dirty cross clung to the roadside and reared up a dull white in the coming night like an impatient ghost. The graves in the yard were nothing more than bits of worn rock. Parkinson gave it a cool look, as if reprimanding a lesser, and flew on.

 The yellow of sodium light gleamed in the distance. The car was slurring slow through the gravel to protect the electric blue paint. Now calmed, she heard a radio bubbling over from its speakers and filling the roadside ditches with a late-night talk show as it passed through a four-way stop ahead. The ghost of a dead dog wobbled in front of their tire and then vanished. 

When she alighted in the backyard of the bed and breakfast her skin crawled. 

There was a plastic blowup figure of a witch on the back lawn. Its green skin was unnatural against the grass, the nose hooked to meet the curved chin. Striped stockings, orange and purple, plastic black hair fluttering. Warts. The hat was belted, the shoes pointy. 

She spat at its feet. 

 

* * *

 

 The waitress of the diner can’t stop staring and hovered around Pansy as if bathing in an aura. 

“What are you all dressed up for?” bellowed the manager as Pansy ordered coffee, black, and a Denver omelette. Her shoes are fawn leather booties, her stockings a filigree of roses, her skirt is an alarmingly short taffeta creation the raw pink of a flesh wound. Her white shirt, silk, was chosen to exhibit the perfect tarry darkness of her bra. Considering how many she had seen flapping on clotheslines during the walk over she thought her brashness would have little effect. Such was not the case. 

“I’m the Brit,” she offered to the manager, a fat redheaded woman who was mostly permed bangs and crooked teeth. Her makeup was cheap and heavily applied, and her eyelashes look like burnt matches. Parkinson assumed her arrival had been heralded. 

“Staying at the Schaetzle’s B&B, aren’t you? You here to see the other one of you?” 

“Pardon?” (She thinks the waitress is going to melt at each new word she speaks.) 

“The other English girl. Would you know her? Name’s Luna. She’s got a lot of hair. Excuse me, ma’am.” The manager waved her hand and went back to the kitchen.  

“Her eyes are like Anne of Green Gables’,” blurted the waitress, who did not know who was going to own her heart more. She hoped Pansy was planning to stay forever. “She’ll be coming in really soon. She always picks up breakfast for her and Emmy.” 

How unexpected. She’s trying to track the ghosts of some hick purebloods and happens to solve the mystery of Luna Lovegood’s disappearance. 

And apparently Luna wanted to live in a town with a population of just over six thousand in the middle of the United States and live with a woman and eat diner food that would most likely need salted. 

Parkinson wasn’t thinking of the ramifications of this chance meeting; she was thinking of Neville. 

The waitress, Rosemary Ruth Swanson, 17, president of her 4-H group and her Girl Scout troop, waved frantically. “Ah, here she comes! Luna! We’ve got another one over here!” A laugh as the front door chimed, bright enough that Pansy’s memories shivered and she smelled Neville for no reason at all. “This is Pansy Parkinson! Come say hello!” 

 

* * *

 

Luna glowed. 

It’s a different glow than when she had been at school. Pansy doesn’t remember her very well. She did not keep a catalogue of people to dislike—that had always been Bulstrode. She remembered her mostly from her last year. As each term finished she had brought a list to her mother, skin prickling with shame, and a very skilled witch had carefully removed each memory Parkinson had jotted down. Thus, much of her seventh year at Hogwarts was a blur. She was free, free at an altitude that smarted when she saw how the war had ravaged her memory-whole schoolmates. 

This is why Pansy, older, always tried to be kind. 

Luna had glowed then. The glow that resonated now was so close to the surface Pansy was sure she could take the knife in her boot and some essence would drip from any cut to Luna’s arm, an essence that wasn’t fury or righteousness or whatever it had been those few years past. Pansy, feeling the astrolabe at her throat, is certain it’s time. Trapped, gossamer-light, flooding Luna’s veins and now slick under her skin, pressing around all that soul-stuff and keeping her forsaken.  

Luna said, “I tried to help you last night when you were attacked.”  

“It was a flock of dead birds.” Pansy’s hair shivered above her shoulders as she tilted her head. “Acting out the past. I needed altitude. Were you surprised?” 

“I didn’t even know what it was, at first. Will you excuse me?” She took out her phone and began to text. “I’m sorry, someone will begin joining us.” 

“Your girlfriend, Emmy?”

Luna smiled. “Emmy is for Emory. I want you to meet him.” Her face grew solemn. “He’s a werewolf.” 

This, this Pansy remembered, the sorrowful cow-eyes Luna made when she got very serious. It had irritated her then and it irritated her now. They were a confrontation meant for the recipient to think harder than they would like. It was a tactic made in ignorance, which made it more irritating.  

“So,” sighed Pansy, “you disappear at the site of a leper colony. Burnt wand. Your field notes are found. You’re published with your father’s permission once it has been decided you expired. You become a household name for half a year. The magizoologist that could have been, et cetera. There’s some talk of new legislation because of what you scribbled down. How much of this do you know?” 

“None,” said Luna, always sedate. 

“Well then.” 

“Well?” 

“That’s all of it. Your father’s dead, your newspaper was sold, you left behind a legacy, but it’s going. I’m sure your friends would think differently.” 

“But you don’t?” 

Pansy laughed. Via the corner of her eye she saw everyone in the diner’s heads swivel, like dogs catching a scent. It made her skin crawl. 

“Lovegood, you may have picked the typical rebellion of the upper echelon, but no one will treat you like you did. Spurn magic! Go live with the Muggles! Come back full of _understanding_ and _patience_. If I had a galleon for every time I heard about some spoilt pureblood breaking their wand and going off to live as _they_ do to shock mummy and daddy I’d have a much bigger trust fund.” 

“I’m not—“ 

“Of course you’re not. No one thinks you are. But there’s nothing original in this.” 

“Is that your point?” 

Pansy quieted and smiled. Her teeth were little white daggers. Luna envied their sharpness. 

“I do miss it,” she offered to the daggers.  

“The ones who do not are those who confuse it with something else.” Parkinson thinks of the Owens’ and their God. “Or those who cannot see past structure to magic itself. I envy you your freedom.” 

Luna began to braid her hair. Her body was stiff now, expectant. Emory will be arriving shortly, Pansy guessed. “Pansy—“ she began, but Pansy interrupted once more. 

“I talk to ghosts for a living. I know a thousand different ways to live with magic. I come from a…” she patted her mouth with her napkin, examining to see how much lipstick had transferred “…sorry…a tier of people whose lineages mingled with Muggle royalty in an understanding between magic and non-magic, who were angry when that ended. My point, Lovegood, is that I know exactly why you are here.” 

Rain began to fall, though the sun was shining. It lasted all of thirty seconds and the cloud moved on. 

“That’ll keep the dust down,” said someone at the counter, and a gust of wind brought the scent of rain in and fluttered the ugly orange curtains. 

Parkinson was very content for no reason at all. That happens sometimes, when things happen exactly as they ought to in a few perfect moments. 

Their food arrived on the arms of their jubilant waitress, whose section was actually the other end of the restaurant.

“This omelette looks lovely,” Pansy murmured. 

Rosemary Ruth was the colour of a roasted beet. “The hogs are from down the road a piece. For the ham. In the omelette I mean. Your omelette, the Denver omelette. The garden—the vegetables I mean, those are from the Ellis place. They have a roadside stand too. The eggs are from my farm,” she beamed. “Hi, Emmy!” 

“Hey ladybird,” he greeted, and slid next to Luna. 

Well. Congratulations to Luna for finding the only attractive man in perhaps the entire state. His hair was very dark, but his beard had a copper sheen to it, and crept down his neck to meet the whorls of chest hair that were threatening to erupt from behind his shirt. His hands didn’t look scarred enough for this area, for the type of life his Levis were supposed to exude. There was no swarthiness, no homespun innocence in his eyes. They were colour of toasted cashews. The contrast between his hair and eyes was uncanny, but that was all that was worth noting. 

Luna watched Pansy assess her boyfriend in that quick glance and knew it was all surmised with, _So this is the halfbreed_. 

“I was curious why you had the world and you pick the middle of nowhere in a very dull state of America,” said Pansy by way of greeting, “but now it’s obvious.” 

They both blushed. 

“My name is Pansy Parkinson,” she said, and her entire countenance changed to such warmth that Luna was startled. “I’m a pureblood genealogist. I went to school with Luna.” 

“So why did you come around to these parts? Ladybird, the short stack please?”

Rosemary had forgotten she was fidgeting at the side of their table. She hiccuped and fled to the kitchen. 

“I was distracted by a journal I found. I’m tracing a couple buried here in the 1960s. Their daughter died and I cannot find any other family. I want to talk to their ghosts.”

“The name’s not familiar.” 

“Oh, drop the act. You’re not from around here. Neither of you have been here long. And at that, I wouldn’t begin questioning people your age.” She shrugged and stabbed her omelette with a daintiness Luna could not fathom possessing. “I am curious why you both had the world—“ she pointed her fork at Luna to indicate this humanised passport “—and you pick _here_.” 

“My life was very simple before I went to Hogwarts. I wanted that again.” 

“And for you, Emory?” She ignored how they were both bristling under this unwanted interrogation by a perfect stranger. Slipping into nosy analyst was as fluid as foot after foot when slipping downstairs. Even of she was consciously aware of it, she didn’t care. 

(“Pancakes,” Rosemary Ruth whispered, not even looking at Emory as she slid them to Pansy.)

“Thanks Rose,” Emory smiled. He spread his arms over the back of the bench. Pansy was distracted by the broadness of his chest for the briefest millisecond.

“I’m from Boston. Son of two lawyers. I started riding trains. I was a crustpunk—you know what that is?” 

“I’m from the birthplace of punk,” Pansy snorted. “Did you have a dog?” 

(As an aside, Pansy did not follow punk history in the least bit, other than a phase her fourth year designed to irritate her mother. She’d bought records of 80s garage punk bands. Her mother shrieked about besmirching the dignity of the victrola. Parkinson’sonly _true_ encounter with crust punk, which she felt was authentic enough to warrant a tone now that she was speaking of it that left no trace of the dilettante, occurred when tracking the ghost of a junkie who had died in a warehouse and stumbled across the nest of a few of these creatures. She’d bought them all pizza, gained two fleas, and did simple light tricks after they’d all shared a blunt. In the morning she’d taken herself to the nearest clinic and had herself tested for every disease she might have contracted from shared spit alone, despairing but exultant from her night of rebellion. She was happy to no longer be nineteen and immature.)

“Didn’t have one actually,” said Emory, tapping on the table with his fingers. It jiggled Pansy’s plate and she picked up her fork. “But anyway, I got bit. Killed the guy. Don’t know if he was registered or anything like that. Wound doesn’t really heal, you know? But I was dumb and didn’t want to go home.” He laughed and began to drown his pancakes in syrup. “Then Luna found me, knew what was going on, helped me get everything right again.” 

“I want to help people,” said Luna, simply. “I want to become a teacher.” 

“Of?” 

“Muggles. I’ve been teaching Muggles about magic. They’re not Muggles anymore. Humans.” She made the last word very rich and round. It resonated in Pansy’s mind. It irritated her, this snivelling compassion. Pansy hated self-righteousness. 

“It helps when you have a specimen to present.” 

“Nah, it’s not like that,” said Emory, eating his pancakes with more gusto than Pansy felt appropriate for them. “Just little things. Like if someone’s cow’s been hurt and we find the fairies who did it. We’ve found three other werewolves. There were some naiads who were drowning kids in the next town over. We let everyone know. Doesn’t bring their kids back, but no one will swim there now. They’re thinking of filling in the place but they need to raise the money for it.” 

Parkinson was finished eating. The omelette was, alas, rubbery. Her hands were in her lap, and she was looking at Luna and Emory equally, though only one was speaking. 

“How have you not been caught?” 

“Well,” said Luna, “American magic is different.” 

“How long have you been here?” 

“Over a year now. I’m presumed dead. I know that much. They aren’t looking for me.” 

“No, your coffin was empty.” 

There was a silence, and Pansy did not want to say what was coming next. She waited for them. Luna, never embarrassed, sighed. “It’s worth it.” 

“Rebelling against the Statute of Secrecy?” 

Said Emory, stretching in seat, “It’d be nice to get it overthrown.” 

Pansy laughed hard enough people turned in their seats to gawk. She slapped her hand on the formica tabletop and her plate rattled.  

“Oh, worthy, worthy, yes, feign your deaths, both of you, for something such as that.”  

She smiled into their unyielding face. Pansy leaned forward, as if sharing a secret.  

“What—“ began Luna—

“There were some families,” Pansy interrupted, and she was an excellent interrupter, “such as the Malfoys, who weren’t keen on the whole Voldemort fiasco. Being pureblood is important of course but not as much as it was centuries ago. Emory, how much magical history do you know?” 

“Enough to get by,” he said humbly. 

Pansy was liking him far too much. 

“As I mentioned before your arrival, and as Luna already knows, there were a few golden centuries of magic and non-magic cooperation. Magic was important. Then it wasn’t. There was fragmentation. A mess of things much too long to speak of here. Some children were supposedly burned at the stake. The first blood purists pretended the matter was greater than it was and decided we were all in danger and created the Statute. And we’ve been an ugly, inbred, homogenous little creature ever since. You know what’s left of us? Teenagers in graveyards pretending at séances. The Order of the Golden Dawn. That.” 

She pointed at the black cat on the diner counter. _Happy Halloween_ was scrawled in white puff paint across its arched plywood body. 

“That is the remnant of our glorious past. So after the war, and Emory, I am speaking of the war that led Luna here, all these blood purists remembered the old golden ages. What would be the absolute show of cleansed hands? A restoration.” 

 It was Luna’s turn to laugh. 

“Of course,” Pansy waved her nails at Luna, silver rings reflecting in the table. “Yes, but the idea is gaining support. Luna, who told you your father is dead? Longbottom?” 

Luna slowly shook her head. 

“Do you communicate with anyone at all?” 

Luna looked at Emory, who offered nothing in his gaze as he looked down at her. They had not known each other for very long, Pansy deduced. 

Luna fidgeted in her seat. “Harry Potter.” 

Pansy graciously paid for all three’s breakfast with an apology for taking up so much of their time. They had talked for three hours when all was said and done. Her firm promise to let no one know of their whereabouts was discussed, with a little bit of anxiousness, by Luna and Emory on their way home. 

As for Pansy, the emotional residue she was left to divine afterwards made her realise one thing: she was lonely. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.


End file.
